The final show today was the highlight — “Pumping Iron: Dynamic Languages on .NET” where Harry Pierson talked about the benefit of dynamic typing languages and why they are useful to .NET users. Great presentation, and great arguments on why the lack of compile time checking is NOT really an issue. IronPython was used in the code example, which is something I am a bit familiar with.

Dynamic Languages @ MicrosoftJohn Lam, Senior Program Manager for Visual Studio Managed Languages discussed the Dynamic Language Runtime. In response to his own rhetorical question asking why Microsoft would support dynamic and open source languages on the .NET runtime, he listed the following reasons:

The Dynamic Language Runtime(DLR) was refactored from the IronPython implementation. Common code and services that were needed for dynamic languages was extracted into a reusable framework.

Because the DLR is distributed as MSPL, anyone can port to other platforms. So assemblies can run on Mono without changes.

Microsoft is hoping to have Rails running on the DLR by RailsConf 08. John demoed Django today, but acknowledged having to make a few changes to the Django source to do so. He also admitted that both IronRuby and IronPython have performance issues right now.